OCTOBER 31, 2007

Talk shows

FIA President Max Mosley has been saying some odd things of late and his latest series of remarks on the BBC programme Hard Talk have carried on the same trend. Mosley suggested that he believes there is "a tendency to exaggerate the importance of Lewis Hamilton" and said that if Hamilton was not there people would be talking about Nico Rosberg, Robert Kubica or Sebastian Vettel. That is clear but Hamilton's unprecedented rookie season in F1 is astonishing, particularly as he has humbled double World Champion Fernando Alonso and achieved what he has achieved despite considerable stress and strain brought on by punishments and investigations.

Mosley went on to say that if Hamilton does the same thing next year "it will start to be negative because we'll get the Schumacher effect where people start writing to me saying, 'Can't you do something to slow him down'?" which seems to suggest that Hamilton has had a fairly major impact on the sport this year.

Mosley was keen to talk about the independence of the FIA International Court of Appeal but once again made his own feelings known.

"Even if they excluded those cars they are not obliged to reclassify Hamilton," Mosley said. "There's absolutely no need, if they don't wish to, to change the position that Hamilton was in."

Having twice attacked Sir Jackie Stewart as being a "certified halfwit", Mosley's remarks about Hamilton were pretty controversial as well, saying that "it would be surprising if he didn't know something of what was going on, but I've got absolutely no evidence that he had. On that basis it would be wrong of me to suggest that he had."